Thursday was kind of rough, because I didn't get enough sleep. Sweetie and I discussed the root cause, and I have standing instructions about the proper response to directives that fuck with my sleep. When safe and practical to do so, the proper response is: "Fuck off."

Friday, I had a doctor's appointment. The gyn appointment had two high blood pressure readings in a row, and that gets me sent to my GP for another blood pressure reading and maybe a lecture about salt. So I went in and got my blood pressure read by an assistant who (despite the helpful presence of an honorific in my name as displayed) managed to gender me. The first reading was high. The second reading was okay-ish. And that was it.

I had scheduled my day for a rough interaction with the medical establishment, so when I got home (early) I decided that I would call (eep, phone) the office with the sleep doctor, to request a re-match with a different doctor. (And I came home to a message from my friend phone, asking was I going to come down to the beer bash. I decided I would think about that after the sleep doctor interaction.)

I called and talked to the scheduling person, and explained that I had been referred to the sleep doctor, I had had an appointment, but I had had a bad experience in the appointment and ended it early. And I would like to talk to a different doctor.

The scheduling person apologized that I had had a bad experience, and asked me the nature of the bad experience.

I opened my mouth. No words came out.

One of the problems that I have with the phone, and one of the things that sort of drives Purple bats about talking on the phone with me, is that where a normal human might go "Uhhhh", I just go silent (unless my verbal output buffer glitches and I get the same word or syllable repeating). It's a problem because in the day of phones which helpfully silence background noise when they can, it sounds more or less equivalent to a dead line.

She started making the "Are you there" noises. I made "Yes I'm here" responses in response, and tried again to make words about my experience come out. "I, ... I, ... I, ... "

It went on like that for a while.

"No," I finally said.

It turns out that this doctor is the only doctor in the department. I had to say "And I don't want to see him ever again" fairly firmly, several times. This office could not refer me to a different location; I would have to go back to my GP for that one.

So I looked up and called the scheduling office of my GP. The person on *that* phone was nicely responsive to the "Reverend. I don't have a gender." which is becoming my standard response to any sort of gendered honorific. (Exception: Purple and the Gentle Caller are allowed.) He corrected himself and moved on. The desired situation was that my GP give me a referral to the sleep department in Oakland, and that any phone calls to discuss this should be scheduled via email. (We appear to be learning.) This guy was the most gender-aware of all the people there that I spoke to all day. Yay. (He was sorry that everyone else sucked.)

It turns out that attempting to explain out loud the sleep doctor related fuckery (especially because it's got such potential for gaslighting) threw me into a really vulnerable and unhappy state. I looked at phone's message and decided that no, really, I was not going to be up for beer bash, not with shenanigans after.

I fell over into bed a little, and my Gentle Caller offered empathy and snuggles via text. (Also various forms of Protective Anger, which from them is nicely reassuring.) quartzpebble has volunteered advocacy time for the next sleep appointment, because fuck so much of that noise. The Gentle Caller calmed me down enough to nap, and nap I did, and woke refreshed.

I then picked up tiferet, and we headed off to dinner (excellent fun) and thence to shopping.

It seems that if I am an Alpha, I have acquired a very *very* sensible Supervisor who reminds me that "Fuck off!" is a complete sentence non-compliance is a social skill. Also, sithjawa and inoru_no_hoshi were playing internet shopping games, where the object is to find the most ridiculous item in a given category. ...And this time, that category was dildoes.

Unfortunately, shopping was marred by technical fail, so we were out later than intended. Alas. But we did have fun, which was important. And the hypo-allergenic earring selection these days is much better than when I developed my metal allergies two decades ago.